And I have one last short, urban thing.
At the end of this, I reference the flipboard
in train stations.
I don't know if you know the flipboards because many of them
are gone.
There was a beautiful one in the train station in Baltimore.
And there was a great one in Penn Station in New York.
And you know, when the trains come, they flip.
And it's such a great sound.
I'm just afraid they're also obsolete
that you won't understand the sound of the flipboard.
There are some out there still.
So, you know, lest you think I'm some green wanderer,
I do live in Baltimore city.
And we have our issues in Baltimore.
This is called "On Luxury."
"No one's ready.
To sit here on a wooden bench and not
have to think of a gunman shattering the train station's
bustle.
Early light, scent of coffee.
That's a luxury.
I forget sometimes, like I forget having legs,
which is just a given, we say.
But it is given.
I'm not arguing by God, luck, or science--
just that it could be otherwise.
And luxury is its best measure, that unit lux,
of illumination, diurnal in slices across a pine floor,
ferocious midday translucing my boy's ear,
drooling a wine berry, breaking in surf,
and in outgoing ripples recomposing its silvery veil.
Here, canine patrols are making their rounds,
sniffing our bags, moving along.
People take mild note and return to their business.
Why aren't we ready to think of our peace?
How amazing I've never planned my escape.
Quick, let me think.
I'd run down to the tracks, jump off the end,
hide under the platform.
But I needn't do that.
Luxury to read in the Baltimore Sun the phrase 'murder rate'
and not have to see the facts of my life recounted therein.
Luxury to read and not follow the phrase down
to a bloody wet stash of drugs, clothes torn and scattered,
the whole torrent of shit, junk, paraphernalia,
jumping the curb, sluicing a front stoop,
my stoop, the one I'd climb daily returning from work,
couldn't scrub clean with deep cracks
where the necklace they shot him for landed.
Luxury to turn back, to roll coffee paper,
to pair the word shooting with elsewhere, to let elsewhere
be faceless and stoopless, miasmic panegyric,
and broken from mainland, unmapped, unscratched,
or sketched very badly and broadly
with stylized alley and pile of garbage,
shattered glass, prostitutes.
I can skim fast, skip the rock of my gaze over the headlines,
let it grip nothing, be seized by nothing,
just skitter across and sink.
Yes, luxury-- in Latin, also defined as a vicious
indulgence--
looks like bagged pastries, coffee, briefcases,
neat rolling suitcases--
I still think they're marvels--
red caps with trolleys helping the oldsters;
benches, a rich, worn mahogany; walls of marble,
and quarried in Sicily; wall sconces, bronze;
and the whole of the interior lined with creamy rookwood
of Cincinnati tiles.
I'm balancing on the very edge of the beaux-arts
here, as the well-intentioned music
policy promotes this morning's calming selection, the New
World Symphony.
And here comes the English horn's rise-and-stretch moment,
all the tender, new, foresty ferns unfurling, slow rambles
in meadows, encounters with moss,
swallows, silvery waterfall, everything fresh,
alighting, awaking.
And here I am, among those in the station,
arriving and departing, here and alive.
Alive and recalling how tense that passage
when I played it myself, the exposed intervals, not terribly
complicated but treacherous still.
As every English horn player knows,
careless phrasing at the modulation or tempo too slow
tanks the primordial, tips the whole thing into crassness.
Even today I'm nervous hearing it,
having been trained to anticipate ruin and adjust.
Here, now, in the station, I'm listening hard,
as he is to the music, in a moment of stillness, awaiting
his train, this beautiful, scruffy conservatory student
en route to New York with his violin.
I see his distraction--
not this again, not the new world.
Then a softening as he busies himself.
It's Dvorak at least, not Pachelbel's godawful "Canon."
As he takes out his book, travel cup, iPod, plugs himself in--
Mahler, I bet he's a serious sort--
the board flips to departures, and he gathers his stuff.
There he goes toward his train.
There he goes with the crowd, finding the gate.
He's distracted-- his girlfriend, audition,
apartment.
He's not thinking this lightness,
this early bird ramble could be the very last thing he hears.
There he goes, off to Gate E with that luxury."
Thank you so much.
[APPLAUSE]